Comment 41 for bug 37828

(In reply to comment #11)
> For languages without complex script requirements, the non-Pango code is quite
> adequate. This includes European languages, most East Asian languages (CJK),
> and Hebrew. As far as I know, only Indic languages and Arabic (including
> Persian/Farsi) really benefit from the Pango path.

As the 0th or even 1st-order approximation, what you wrote above is more or less right, but it's not that simple. See bug 215219 comment #97. Korean has complex script requirements (unfortunately, Pango's Korean support is inferior to that of ours because my patch to Pango a few years ago never got merged). So do Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.

(In reply to comment #13)

> It certainly is desirable! and we're working on it. It's just that with FF1.5/2
> that requires some fairly nasty tradeoffs.

In retrospect, my dirty hack in bug 215219 might have been an acceptable compromise for ff 1.5. With that, MathML still works well, Arabic/Hebrew work decently, and there's little performance loss for "non-complex" scripts.

BTW, the version field for this bug is set to 1.0branch, but that's not quite right given that ff 1.0 (gecko 1.7branch) branch does not contain blizzard's patch for bug 214715. RedHat and other distros ported the patch to ff 1.0 and still includes FF 1.0 instead of 1.5 (even Fedora Core 5 has 1.0.x whose PS printing module is not so good because bug 234182 was not fixed for FF1.0/Gecko 1.7). In our tree, it's not until gecko 1.8 that his patch was incorporated.